Arvin Nogueras, also known as Caliph8 (primarily associated with early Manila graffiti and hip-hop mutations) is born in 1977 at Manila, Philippines.
He sees his work as a continuum. Since the early 90s, his interest in various art forms has allowed him to cross and merge different disciplines. He uses an assortment of modes to realize his ideas into actual works or performances, always negotiating a multiplicity of relationships with the past, while inhabiting the present. His exploration of visual and sonic experiences has led him to develop a creative language that addresses ideas of merging sensibilities and creating hybrids, and their transformative implications. Overall, this approach emphasizes the multifaceted approach inherent to the experimentation process.
2000 BFA, University of the Philippines, Quezon City (RP)
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My work explores the process and implications of fusion, addition and transformation, where I create a mutation or hybrid of certain phenomena from the past to the present. It is often provoked by the real contrast of different living conditions, cultural phenomena of the past and occult images of my subconscious. My job also involves certain health conditions that I suffer from, which have made me a hypochondriac.
I see my work as a miscegenation or amalgamation of these ideas, experiences and conditions.
My aesthetic attempts to merge an assortment of cultural sensibilities creating an unbalanced tension. I say this because I approach and shape these elements initially as someone with hip hop sensibilities that are quite indelible, which ignores certain cultural protocols or traditions. This quirky way of intertwining tangential ideas and cultural sensitivities makes the entire creative process subversive in its ways of juxtaposing, or even truncating, them into granular forms, causing an effect of blending and disorientation.
I have a proud history with the roots of graffiti and hip hop culture, but I also bite the hand that feeds me and cut off its head; graffiti sensibilities are strongly present in my work but in a sense they are also broken, malformed and dystopian in their state, destroying and rebuilding their essence, creating hybrid forms and ideas.
I’m interested in certain social phenomena, how people are in a state of herd mentality. Seeing most as victims and being like sheep versus celebrating a variety of culture and sensitivities, discerning and digesting them then taking a shit and then creating new things from that shit.
I am interested in exploring and manipulating sound, which I believe influences my visual aesthetics and vice versa.
A Rotten Pile of Temporary Realizations
OPENING:
Saturday, May 03, 2014, 6 p.m.
EXHIBITION DATA:
May 03 to June 27, 2014
1335MABINI presented Arvin Nogueras in a solo exhibition titled “A Rotten Pile of Temporary Realizations” from May 3 to June 27, 2014. Working with metropolitan waste infused with underground sensibilities, Arvin drew attention to urban objects with subversive tendencies. In total disregard of conventions, the artist left in his wake a mass of raw and crude works, abrasive to dominant artistic and cultural trends. Arvin draws inspiration from his background in graffiti and hip-hop, and undoubtedly subverts them with his material and audio manipulations. With this exhibition, Arvin highlighted the city streets and the subconscious, letting it ferment with its particularities to give the taste of the repulsive right under our noses.
